The Saudi coalition insist that they are not targeting Yemeni civilians, even as it transpires a hospital and flour mill were recently bombed.

Another day, another airstrike on the tortured nation of Yemen at the hands of the US-backed Saudi coalition.

Two separate strikes on 22/01/2018, on a hospital and a flour mill, claimed the lives of nine civilians: five of whom were children and one a woman in the seventh month of pregnancy. No Houthi insurgents were named as victims of either strike.

A spokesman for the Saudi coalition has reiterated that the despotic monarchist state is not targeting civilians in their intervention into Yemen. However, he refused to comment on the specifics of these attacks, doing nothing to enlighten us with their thought process that led the world’s fourth largest military and intelligence apparatus to view a flour mill and small hospital in the Saada Governorate as a nucleus of militant extremism.

According to the Legal Center for Rights and Development almost 13,000 Yemeni civilians have so far been killed by Saudi airstrikes. If their claim that no civilians are being targeted is in fact true, the House of Saud should look for a refund on the £40 billion worth of BAE Systems aircraft which they have purchased from the UK since 1985, and could perhaps ensure the sights are calibrated to a higher degree of accuracy on the $350 billion worth of weapons that they will receive over the next ten years from the US, owing to a record weapons deal signed with the Donald Trump administration last May.

If, as all international watchdogs would testify, this is an intentional slaughter of civilians rather than an absurd number of missiles going stray, then Saudi Arabia’s attempt to effectively bulldoze their southern neighbours and turn Yemen into a plantation represents one of the worst genocides in modern history.